Of all the dysfunctional family narratives that came out of the 1990s and the early 2000s, one of the best was “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” by Alexandra Fuller (2001).

Fuller is one of those authors who never needs to write fiction; she has more than enough material in her own life.

Born in England, she spent most of her childbhood in Africa, growing up in Kenya and in the breakaway republic of Rhodesia. Her parents, white settlers, operated a farm right on the border with Mozambique.

Little Alexandra (known to the family as “Bobo”) grew up among animals, but also among parents and grown-ups who toted Uzis and pistols wherever they went. At one point, her boarding school was shelled by guerrillas.

“Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs” told her story from a child’s point of view, and what sticks in the mind is Fuller’s portait of her mum and dad: brilliant, attractive, funny, hard-drinking people, brave, more than a little careless and more than a little mad. (Her father set himself on fire at Fuller’s wedding reception. He lived.)

A New York Times best seller, “Don’t Let’s Go” was a Times Notable Book and the winner of multiple prizes and citations. Fuller, meanwhile, married an American river guide, moved to Wyoming, had three children of her own and went on writing. “Scribbling the Cat” continued her account of the Rhodesian civil war, told from the persepctive of a soldier known only as K. “The Legend of Colton H. Bryant” followed a real American cowboy.

Fuller, however, was still drawn to her parents. (Remarkably — if you read “Don’t Let’s Go” –they all remained on speaking terms, although her mother, in her cups, was known to refer to Bobo’s work as “That Awful Book,” with caps you could hear. Like Lord Voldemort, the book’s name was not spoken in the Fuller family.)

Time, and parenthood, will add perspective, so Fuller retells her first story in “Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness,” which came out last year and is now out in a paperback edition from Penguin ($15).

This time, Fuller fills in the back story of her mother and father’s lives. (That’s Fuller’s mom, Nicola, on the cover, at age 4 or so in Kenya, with her best friend “Stephen Foster,” a neighbor’s pet chimpanzee.)

And in a way, she repays a debt. In “Don’t Let’s Go,” the Fullers, especially Nicola, or Mum,often resembled attractive monsters. “Cocktail Hour” fleshes them out and humanizes them. As Fuller certainly acknowledges, they suffered more than she did in many ways. What’s remarkable is how they kept going — and lived well, as the best revenge.

Nicola grew up in a “pukka-pukka” middle-class household in Kenya, definitely NOT of the elite, decadent “Happy Valley” set that James Fox skewered in “White Mischief.” (Mum has a “Happy Valley” story of their own.) She was a natural horsewoman who hated school and adored books and dogs.

Dad, Tim, was the neglected son of a frustrated Royal Navy captain. Turning his back on his family’s maritime tradition, he became a natural farmer, the sort of man who’d naturally pick up a handful of soil and start mentally calculating its pH balance. He escaped dreary postwar England, landing in Kenya, where he met the dazzling Nicola coming off an airliner, just back from an unfortunate attempt at secretarial school in London.

In another age, the Fullers could have been brave pioneers on the frontier of America or Australia, building a new land. Their fatal flaw — what Fuller calls her family’s “disease and soul’s cure” — was their love of Africa. They tried to live elsewhere and couldn’t.

They wanted the land. Trouble was, the natives wanted it, too, and the Fullers wound up on the wrong side in a decades-long struggle over colonial injustice. (Fuller makes clear that her parents were white supremacists — at least in the ’60s and ’70s — although, like many of their white counterparts in the American South, they always seemed to get along well with their black neighbors and employeees.)

As Fuller noted, her parents paid more than the ususal price for their follies, including the loss of three children as infants or toddlers. Had they not lived in a Third World country, or a nation under international sanctions, all three of infants or toddlers would likely have grown to adulthood. The loss drove Mum over the edge, into the realms of madness.

Fuller’s story has a happy sort of ending. We last see Mum and Dad happily resettled in Zambia, running a fish and banana farm, at peace with their neighbors, cheerfully getting pickled on cheap South African wine under the Tree of Forgetfulness in back of their new house. (The “tree of forgetfulness” is a native species, Fuller notes, full of birds and insects; the locals believe that the spirits of one’s ancestors settle in its trunk and branches, chasing away trouble and helping the living with their problems.)

A natural storyteller, Fuller avoids sentimentality, and lets her parents tell their version of things in their own voice as much as possible. (Dad’s a bit deaf, so Mum yells in his ear.) All three are the sort of people one hopes to run into at a party, and they’ll keep you entertained for hours.

About This Blog

This is an emporium for all things literary: occasional book reviews, local book news, items about authors (mostly from the Cape Fear area but occasional visitors) and miscellaneous rants.

The usual author is Ben Steelman, feature writer and book columnist for the Star-News. He’s that shaggy, slightly smelly character you spot lurking in the back aisles of your local bookstore. Physically, he has more than a passing resemblance to Ignatius J. Reilly, hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” — some observers have noted other parallels as well.